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Workshop A
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop A - Session 1
Marc Ant represents the Technical Assistance Office of the LEONARDO DA VINCI Programme in Brussels. A recent LEONARDO conference in Luxembourg tried to analyse the relationship between employment, training and education, or should I say education, training and employment. To me the question reflected on ways of transition. It was a question of the passage from a status of a non-employed person to the status of an employed person. When I say non-employed, I mean those leaving school and those being unemployed or at risk of being excluded from the labour market. This was the major subject of this conference. Of course it started off with the great statement that European Society in general is confronting a certain number of challenges and the response must be that we must promote technological innovation in order to increase competitiveness. But we also have to consider that, at the same time, we have a problem of the passage from the situation of non-employment to a situation of employment, especially young people leaving the school system, particularly those who are not qualified, not enough qualified, and those who have been away from the labour market for many reasons - some on a voluntary basis, some, the majority, on a non-voluntary basis. These people want to reintegrate into the labour market and that is even more complicated nowadays than it used to be. It would require a larger and larger amount of money to reintegrate these people. The conference wanted to analyse the relationship between training and employment in the perspective of social and professional integration, meaning the integration in the labour market with the social aspects which are involved as well. This is meant in a sense of improvement of employability and also meant to develop a few good examples of good practice which were issued from the LEONARDO programme as such. The debates during the conference were centred around four major topics:
Consider the first point. In this context of industrial change and the increasing rareness of work, it was concluded during this conference that vocational training must be linked to vocational guidance, and that not only vocational training but also vocational guidance must be seen in a life long perspective. We have to go away from this vocational guidance which takes place just after leaving school, directing you towards one profession and that is it. We have to go much further than this. This implies that the profession of those involved in vocational guidance has changed. People have to start to speak a common language. The language of labour, the language of training and the language of vocational guidance must be linked. The problem was also raised that vocational guidance is an inter-institutional problem. Schools, companies, unemployment guidance, labour institutions and so on must work much better together in order to solve the problem. If there is a time for work, if there is a time for training, there should also be a time for guidance. The second conclusion was that the school system must also, if not change, at least play a different role. If you want increased employability, and you want to help people to get into the labour market through vocational guidance measures, you cannot do that if you have only young people coming out of school who have knowledge, in the classical sense of the term, but not in this more modern sense of the term. To have knowledge which is very technological and includes technical competencies and no broad competencies and no experience of any kind of labour market activities, that is another issue. We need to help young people to get this experience, to get the different kinds of competencies which are required. The new role of vocational guidance should be able to play a very important part in that. Investment I would also like to mention that it was emphasised in this conference, that the creation of new activities to improve employment has to be paralleled with investment into new opportunities for learning and for apprenticeships, apprenticeships in the large sense of the word, in terms of work-based training. This is particularly true for those people who are already active on the labour market, but who only have a few qualifications or not enough qualifications or inappropriate qualifications. The new competencies and the new qualifications which are needed must be enhanced also in the form of a better dialogue, and a better collaboration, between the school system and all the people who are more directly involved in the labour market. Universities or higher schools are also tempted to change their role a little bit. I think it is necessary, and this was mentioned also during the conference, to create what we could call a European observatory of good practice in this area. The objective would be not to harmonise, but to enable us to learn from each other. The countries' institutions can and should learn from each other to improve practice, not to photocopy them but to improve and to adapt to one's own situation. 'Job rotation' is a good example of something which goes throughout Europe right now, but I am not sure whether the Danes will recognise in the end their original job rotation when it comes out somewhere else. If I may conclude, then what came out from this conference in Luxembourg was that vocational guidance must be conceived as a life long activity. Second, this vocational guidance idea must also be based more and more on the individual's responsibility. The individual is not a passive recipient of this whole thing; the individual must become an active member of the dynamics which is involved. And thirdly, it was also said that this kind of vocational guidance, linked to training and to education, must imply individualised pathways throughout a person's career. We have a mass production. We used to have in the 1970s a mass production of vocational training where everybody went in, but no real link was established with what you really needed. Today the idea came out with the individual pathways of vocational guidance and of learning and of training and maybe of working. Finally, I would like to mention that also we have to develop more and more the appropriate instruments and tools which will enable us to enhance vocational guidance and this transition from non-employment to employment more and more.
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